Possibly as a reaction against the often comical
monsters that appear in science fiction films, science fiction writers and editors have generally
stayed away from stories of alien creatures. The
mood of the genre traditionally has been optimistic
about the universe. Since the 1930s, aliens generally have been portrayed either as sympathetic or
as rivals much as other human cultures might be
rivals. War between humans and aliens might be
inevitable, but it would be fought for racial pride,
profit, or territory, not to prevent hideous creatures
from despoiling human women or eating babies.
That aversion is so powerful that the handful of
true monster stories in the field are almost always
of extraordinary quality, so well written or so well
conceived that editors could not possibly turn
them down.
A case in point is “Who Goes There?” by John
W. CAMPBELL Jr. Campbell, who would spend most
of his later career as an editor rather than as a
writer, wrote several space operas in the style of
Edward E. SMITH and engineering problem stories
set on alien worlds. His writing improved very
quickly and he might have become a much more
significant figure as an author had he continued,
although his influence as an editor was certainly
greater. This particular story is atypical for him, as
it was for the field in general, but it is also his most
impressive fictional achievement, a vivid suspenseful thriller that became the basis of a less than
faithful adaptation, The Thing (1951, also known
as The Thing from Another World), and a more
faithful remake in 1982. The premise is deceptively
simple: A research station at the South Pole is
temporarily isolated from the rest of the world
when the staff discovers an ancient alien spaceship
in the ice. They also find its pilot, frozen into a
solid block—a dormant creature that can replicate
itself by duplicating organisms it physically
touches, mimicking their appearance, absorbing
much of their memory. The problem lies in finding
a way to determine which of the personnel are still
human and which have been transformed, so that
the creature can be destroyed in all of its manifestations before it can escape into the outside world.
The alien’s potential to replace the entire human
race in a relatively short period of time was far
more frightening than an army of movie monsters,
but Hollywood’s first attempt to bring it to the
screen ignored that deeper terror in favor of a
more traditional man-in-a-rubber-suit creature.